Every lent my parish and most of the parishes in my hometown would have a big seafood dinner on Friday nights. Different grades would help serve, make food, and the parents would volunteer to cook and serve as well. There’d be shrimp, crab, catfish or flounder, and at last, our precious gumbo. Some of the parents would be serving the food on the line, or in the kitchen prepping some. The dads would be in a shed behind the cafeteria battering and frying all of the seafood. This evening there had been some similar scent in the air, because that shed was the image that came flooding back.  Then other memories of those nights came back.

While the parents were cooking, the children were out playing in the school yard and the playground. Of course it was already dark, but we didn’t care. It was the coastal south, so we really had no chilly nights to worry about. For some reason, things seemed safer then. Our parents didn’t worry about us. Maybe it was because our parish and the school were surrounded by a neighborhood, which was mostly filled with families of the parish.  Maybe it was because things were simpler then. I choose to believe the latter.

The best nights were when those meals coincided with the book-fair. The book-fair was the event we look forward to every year. Not that we wanted real, educational books. My brother and I usually spent our allowances on MadLibs and a new car poster to put into our game-room. We would scarf down our seafood, burst from our chairs and bolt down to the library to secure our merchandise. If we were smart with our words and time, we sometimes could get our parents to pay.

I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t usually write these sentimental memoirs. I am not really homesick. I do miss the Catholic-Coastal culture I grew up in. I think was triggered it was reading about the small-parish life in O’Brien’s new novel. I haven’t found that here yet.

My paternal grandparents lived on the coast of the Mississippi sound. I have a lot of fond memories from there. The memories that are rushing to the surface tonight are from their house and town.

I’m sitting on the pier with my grandmother feeding the seagulls stale bread. The salty-muddy scent of the sound is overbearing but I love it. My grandmother watches as I delight in feeding the birds. The cry of the gull enters my heart and never leaves.

Flash to another memory. My brother and I used to go out with my grandfather to check the crab-traps they had out a good distance from the edge of their pier. Too small and young to walk through the muddy sound with him, we tag along in an old dingy boat he pulls behind him. We love the experience until he starts tossing the crabs from the traps into the boat with us. We cower in the corner, fleeing the horrible claws. Paw-paw laughs, knowing no real harm will come from them. They are just dinner.

They had a good bit of land right off the bulkhead on the sound. For major holidays all of us cousins would be there. There were two tall pine trees that stood right next to their swing-house. They were gnarled and twisted from many decades of hurricanes. They were the perfect distance apart for the hammock. All the young cousins piled into it and watched the pelicans glide by. Life was simple.

Spending the night at Nanny and Paw-paw’s always meant early mornings. They would drag us from bed, clean us up, and then go to daily mass at the local parish. I have vague memories of it now, but I know most of the time it was less than 10 people crammed into the rectory for daily mass. Half the people there barely spoke English, like the priest himself. Vietnamese refugees. I wish I could remember more of those experiences. We would sometimes go with them to deliver Eucharist to the sick, and sometimes went to sing to the infirm in nursing homes. One memory of a visit sticks out more than others. It was a larger home. White, plantation looking. The light filtered down through huge live-oaks. I think it was a Vietnamese family.

Come sundown, we’d drag ourselves out to the pier again to watch the sun sink down in the east. It was hot, muggy, and the misquotes were always horrible. But those were the moments I loved best. There was a sense of time standing still coupled with together-ness with family. I could use both of those things now that I live on my own with life racing by at breakneck speed.

Check out my original article here.

This tendency to hide death away receives effective support from the very structure of modern society in which the corporate life of the family in increasingly displaced by the logic of production and the specializations which it has developed.  As a result, the family home frequently seems to more than a sleeping-bag. In the daytime it effectively dematerializes. No more can it be that sheltering space which brings human beings together in birth and living, in sickness and dying.  Indeed, sickness and death are becoming purely technological problems to be handled by the appropriate initiation.  These basic human things are thus pushed to the margins, not just so far as our deliberate thought about them are concerned, but socially, structurally.  They cease to be physical and metaphysical problems which must be suffered and borne in a communion of life, and become instead technical tasks technically handled by technical people.

Something he ends the section with I find to be especially telling:

The dehumanizing of death necessarily brings with it the dehumanizing of life as well.

I must say I am guilty of this mindset to an extent.  I was raised in modern American after all. I think my Southern roots may have allowed me to escape with a slightly better view, since funerals and such are still big social events where I am from.  However, I have always wished that life hadn’t changed so much over the last century. My great-grandparents would have seen their own grandparents and parents die in the family home, and their siblings would have been born there. Live and death were tightly connected. Generations pass, death and birth have been removed to the hospital and the funeral home, and subsequently partitioned in our mindset. What happened to the wake in the family home (I have an aunt that dislikes gardenias because they were always used at wakes to cover the sent of the corpse because of this)? What happened to a Christian always knowing what was going to happen to him? I don’t think its healthy to obsess over death, but it’s just as unhealthy to completely remove it from our mindset. Maybe we American Catholics would do well have a prolonged Ash Wednesday this year. The physical reminded that we are from dust and to dust we shall return could do us some good, and remind us that there is a spiritual side to things, and that death exists but is not the end.

Fr. Longenecker over at Standing on My Head used the phrase “Broadway liturgies” to explain modern masses in some parishes. I can’t say how perfect that title is.  Kudos to Fr. Longenecker for that. Always happy to see new terminology come up.

Check out his post here.